Crisis 22
Rip Van Winkle
Mojitos & a Cigar - El Profesor - Blissful Ignorance - Reveille
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Mojitos & a Cigar
In the 2010s, the notion of World War III was unthinkable. The nightmares of Vietnam and Iraq were over. The violence in Africa and the Middle East was never-ending, yet far away. The less we got involved, the better, I thought to myself. Better to fly to Havana and find a beach with a never-ending supply of cohibas and rum, and dream about the end of military history.
Yet the Russians, what the hell were they doing in Crimea and Donbass? Their KGB agents were long gone from Berlin, and the new Russian oligarchs were guiltlessly ensconced in the luxury apartments of the 16th arrondissement. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 seemed an aberration in time.
The Russians even seemed to have left Cuba in the lurch. The ghosts of the politburo no longer haunted the airwaves or the lecture halls of the University of Havana. And yet why were they aiming missiles at a plane full of Dutch passengers over Donetsk?
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El Profesor
Lured by comical nostalgia, never once imagining that the Russians would be as thin-skinned as they’ve turned out to be, I took it all lightly. I wandered with my wife from a café in Old Havana, through Centro, to the University of Havana. We walked around the echoing halls and into an empty classroom, where I decided to give an impromptu lecture.
I couldn’t help myself: I boiled the nightmares of the Cold War into a digestible fairly-tale, full of sound and fury, told by an idiot. I mocked the whole communist charade, and replaced it with a new form of Café Idealism.
While the Cuban students were in the streets scrounging for money to buy textbooks, I was lecturing in the empty classroom. My wife took a photo, and wondered how long my lecture would last.
I was expostulating in a jocular, taunting way about how The Permanent Revolution had in fact been temporary. Sensing my wife’s impatience, I wrapped it up, assuring my invisible students that it would all end in a free-for-all grand ball, a laissez-faire fiesta, cohibas on the open market, and cappuccinos for everyone.
Yet the Russians were still at it, from Chechnya to Georgia, from Crimea to Donetsk. I sighed, and thought to myself, “Maybe they just need to let off steam. After all, didn’t they recently give back all of Eastern Europe, from Estonia to Bulgaria?”
I also told myself that the rise of populism in the West was a momentary thing. Just a pendulum swing back from all that talk about transgender toilets. It was bound to happen. The Le Pens may have had a dynasty in France, yet they only had about ten percent of the vote. And Trump was too ridiculous to take seriously. Once Americans saw what a dangerous idiot he was, they’d come to their senses.
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Blissful Ignorance
The 2020s changed everything, at least for those of us who were sitting comfortably, smoking cohibas and drinking rum on a beach. Populism wasn’t going anywhere. Nor was Orban, Le Pen, or Trump.
But ah! — what an optimistic escape from history that was during those 30-odd years …
Once upon a time there was a tavern / Where we used to raise a glass or two / Remember how we laughed away the hours / Think of all the great things we would do? // Those were the days, my friend / We thought they'd never end / We'd sing and dance forever and a day / We'd live the life we choose / We'd fight and never lose (“Those Were the Days,” the Mary Hopkin version)
Indeed, I’d join my friends who were drinking mojitos without a care on plastic chairs (which we dragged from the beachside bar to the fringes of the water somewhere north of Viñales), I’d wade aggressively into the water, high as a kite on the dense smoke of a thick cigar, and I’d drink rum and coke like a pirate with a mad Dutchman and his Bolivian girlfriend on a beach near Trinidad:
I’d party with an assortment of drunken tourists in Santiago and ride a scooter through red-brown hills in the tobacco country of Pinar del Río:
For Canadians and Europeans (who wanted nothing to do with the American embargo and the Helms-Burton Act), Cuba was the perfect antidote to Northern winters — and to the depressing escapades of McCarthyism, Vietnam, and Iraq.
Oddly put, Cuba was a dictatorship we could work with. Much like China used to be. It was a place where the pleasures obliterated the facts about human rights, democracy, and poverty — facts that have never been forgotten by the dispossessed Cubans of Miami.
Determined to ignore these facts, Cuba was for us a paradise of golden mulattas and tropical nights, a welcome escape from the austere order, the political correctness, the reality TV shows, and the unbridled consumerism of the North. In the fine spray of the surf and the fine smoke of the cigar, I thought, “Perhaps our American friends will join us one day.” Indeed, Obama had made several steps in that direction…
But all good things must come to an end.
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Reveille: Trumpets of Doom
In 2020 we watched as an American president refused to accept the results of an election. Trump wasn’t just contesting election numbers, as with Bush and Gore in 2000. He was rejecting the whole process, storming the very sanctuary of democracy.
Then the busy years went rushing by us / We lost our starry notions on the way / […] Just tonight I stood before the tavern / Nothing seemed the way it used to be / […] Through the door, there came familiar laughter / I saw your face and heard you call my name / Oh, my friend, we're older but no wiser / For in our hearts, the dreams are still the same (“Those Were the Days,” the Marie-Anne Izmajlov version)
There were of course warning signs from 2016 to 2020, something like brief bursts of a mid-afternoon bugle starting us from our collective nap. Putin took chunks out of Georgia (in Ossetia & Abkhazia) and Donbass (in Luhansk and Donetsk), and he managed to take all of Crimea without even a fight. We heard about little green men, but weren’t those Martians? And were they really eating all the cheese on the moon? It all seemed so ridiculous.
Yet even here our mythology was lazy: if they were Martians, then Mars must have been behind it all. Meanwhile, we were mesmerized by Lady Gaga, Venus de Grande, and La Flaca …
Coral negro de la Habana / Tremendísima mulata / Cien libras de piel y hueso / cuarenta kilos de salsa / y en la cara dos soles / que sin palabras hablan
Black coral of Havana / Insanely mulatta / A hundred pounds of skin and bone / forty kilos of salsa / and in her visage two suns / that speak without words
Just when I was hoping we would meet our American friends on a beach somewhere, lost to the world — somewhere near Caya Coco, or a hundred dancers deep in a rum-muddled street-party in Santiago de Cuba —Trump reversed Obama’s steps toward reconciliation with Cuba. To the joy, I might add, of the Miami Cubans.
And he withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Accord. He suggested we drink bleach martinis to flush out Covid, which he called a bad flu. He stacked the Supreme Court, setting the stage for the defeat of Roe vs. Wade. He gave the rich an obscene tax break. He threatened to withdraw from NATO. And above all of this, he infused a crude and divisive populism into American politics. But these were all things we imagined the election of 2020 would reverse. Surely when Biden came into power, everything would go smoothly again …
Then came the deeper shock of February 24, 2022. From that moment onward, when the row of tanks started rolling toward Kiev, whoever slept soundly wasn’t following the news. Whoever thought about superpower conflict, and about how it might lead to nuclear war, couldn't help but feel disturbed. Not just bothered — by antivaxers, supply chain disruptions, inflation, anti-abortion laws, or the likes of Margery Taylor Greene — but out-and-out disturbed. Like a chicken in a country courtyard, grabbed by peasant hands.
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Next: 🌉 Jovanka on the Bridge